Stephen Beck

Stephen Beck, born 1950 in Chicago, USA, is a video artist, author and inventor. After completing a technical study at the University of California, Berkeley, he graduated as an engineer. He then studied electronic music and composition with John Cage at the University of Illinois, Urbana, USA, where he worked for several years as a technician in the university's experimental music studio, experimenting with light. In 1968 Beck became a member of EAT (Experiments in Art and Technology) in Chicago and in 2006 founded the research project FIAT LUX (Fusion in Art, Technology and Life). The artist has participated in group exhibitions internationally, including Open Circuits, MoMA (1974), American Century, Whitney Museum (2000), Sons & Lumieres, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2004), Colour Fields with Video Weavings, Tate Modern, London (2008), and Changing Channels, MUMOK, Vienna (2010). Beck was also represented at Ars Electronica in Linz (1992) and the 1st Gwangju Biennale (1995). He has received numerous awards, for example from the Rockefeller Foundation and the American Film Institute. The artist lives and works in Berkeley, California, where he runs his own computer company Beck-Tech.